Pros
Smart colleagues used to be the biggest attraction of working with Guavus. However, good people are leaving in droves. That leaves very little for the pros.
Kontras
I guess each company goes through phases. Guavus hasn't seen a good phase for last 5 years and since Thales acquisition, it has entered it's darkest phase ever. I work for India engineering so my review would be biased towards conditions in India. India engineering has the distinction of being lead by management that has no engineering background, no context of what they are doing, and no context of culture. Icing on the cake - they doesn't listen to anyone - except those who suck up to them. In other words - they listens only to yes men. Needless to say, they hear yes all the time :) Bunch of smart senior leaders who helped point out issues and gave sound advice were seen as opposing forces and have been forced to resign. Smarter rank and file is resigning on their own and leaving. Since all of these show up as resignations in the records, all exits are being portrayed as attrition due to change and transformation. Their inability to separate out personal liking and relationships from professional roles is shocking. If you are on their good side, you hang out with them on weekends, and spend evenings partying with them - you are gold and ready for a promotion. Don't believe me? Proof is in the pudding. Whole engineering is sitting in India, whole product was built in India, however, documentation writing team has to travel internationally to document the product - several times a year. And all this while engineering has no budget for hikes or sending engineers to conferences, events, or even customer meetings. Guess the reason :) Guess who was proposed as being classified as most critical resource in the org - a document writer. Sure you could find IITians with 10 year experience in big data a dime a dozen but where would you find someone who knows English and can create a PDF. Change and transformation is the smoke screen being used to perpetrate unbelievable levels of management stupidity. The claim being made is that we are going "agile". Engineering was always agile giving out releases every 3 weeks with pretty decent quality. However, it was claimed that engineering is "too slow" and needs to "go agile" and hence we need a re-org. So we went from well oiled working agile to dysfunctional agile and in the garb of the re-org they pushed out non-yes-man senior technical leadership. It was shocking to witness how Guavus treated its 15+ years experienced technical leaders who had all spent more than 5 years each at Guavus. As a result there is palpable fear in the organization - if you speak up, you may be sitting at home tomorrow - no kidding. And as a result of "going agile" we now have 6 program managers for 40 developers. Since each team is now "self organizing", it does not need technical leadership (force them out of the company) but each "self organizing" team needs a non-technical agile program manager who basically tells the team what to do. Good luck getting things done. So here we are in a product engineering organization being led by non engineering leadership who know nothing about engineering or Indians; organized as "self managed" teams with no mentoring and technical leadership and an army of technically incapable, never been leaders, program managers telling us what to do. The way things are and given the exodus that has started, in next 6 months Guavus would be left ONLY with yes men and those who could not find another equal paying job or those whose inertia is more than their self respect. This begets the question - why CEO is unable to correct the situation? It is hard to believe that a CEO could be so dumb to not see through all this - at the very least he should have known that team was already agile. He should at least have known the team composition. He should have at least known the importance of technical leadership. If only we had a good CEO chosen by Thales.